The Problems With Food Waste

Today is World Environment Day! There’s no better time than now to start a Mission and help save the planet. Why not start with Food Waste Warrior?

Did you know that a lot of Canadians are wasting food? As a country, we throw out more than $31 billion worth of food each year and that’s a big problem!

But the problem isn’t just the fact that we’re wasting money. Think about all of the stuff that went into getting that food from the farm to your plate:

There’s the electricity used on the farm to feed and house animals
Plus, the energy used to power the machines that tend to the crops
Don’t forget about the gas used to transport the food to the store
And then there’s also the energy used at the grocery store to keep the food fresh

All of that energy is wasted when we throw away perfectly good food. To make matters worse, generating energy creates greenhouse gases which are leading to climate change, so wasting energy is definitely not something we should be doing.

But the story doesn’t end there…

After you throw out the food, where does it go? We hope that if you do throw food away it goes in the organics bin or composter, but for a lot of households, it ends of in the trash. No big deal, right? Wrong!

Food that ends up in the garbage hurts the planet:

It causes landfills to fill up faster, which means we need to convert more land into new landfill sites sooner
It attracts animals like seagulls and bears, and they can get sick from eating rotten food or hurt themselves by accidentally eating hazardous materials
When the food breaks down, it releases greenhouse gases into the environment